Date: Thursday 30 Apr 2015
LONDON (ShareCast) - International Personal Finance (IPF), the FTSE 250 home-credit business, said it was making a "progressive improvement" across most markets during the first quarter as underlying profits jumped by nearly a fifth, helped in particular by strong growth in Mexico.
Despite a slowdown in a number of European home-credit markets, the company said pre-tax profit was £10.4m for the first three months of the year, up 18% on an underlying basis.
Strong underlying growth in Mexico, Poland and Lithuania more than made up for declines in the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Hungary and IPF's loss-making operations in Romania, Bulgaria and Spain.
When including new business costs of £2m and the £2.6m negative impact from exchange-rate movements, however, reported group profits actually dropped 18% over last year.
Nevertheless, customer numbers grew 2.4% to 2.63m, while the amount of credit issued rose 0.9% at constant FX to £236.7m.
Chief executive Gerard Ryan said IPF's focus on delivering improved growth "has started to bear fruit".
"We are addressing the slowdown in our European home credit businesses reported during the fourth quarter of 2014 and delivered a progressive improvement in credit issued in most markets during the first quarter," he said.
Analysts at Numis Securities maintained a 'buy' rating on IPF after Thursday's statement, saying that trends were broadly improving in the first quarter even though results were slightly mixed from region to region.
"The star of the show was Mexico (the bears now forget that this market was apparently never going to work) which improved its profit per customer 19.5% to MXN503 from the MXN421 in Q1 last year," the broker said. Reported profits from Mexico increased by 50% to £3m.
IPF's shares were up 0.6% at 495.4p by 15:20.
113.00p
